SoundExchange: Label your music if you want to get paid

SoundExchange, the establishment that has been tasked with collecting royalties for copyright holders and artists from music streaming services on the Internet, satellite radio and maybe traditional radio soon too, has told artists to label their music properly if they wish to receive their royalties.

SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson wrote in Billboard that the company actually has trouble finding out who owns the copyright to some songs it tracks and claims royalties for. He said the organization had about $40 million in royalties that it collected in 2008, which it could not distribute to artists and copyright owners because it couldn't find them.

Why not? Because the copyright owners didn't attach enough information to the song. Simson pleaded that at the very least, every song should include metadata identifying the artist, song name, album name, label or copyright owner.

SoundExchange also is holding $39 million for artists and copyright holders that simply have not registered with SoundExchange yet.

4 user comments

soundexchange has hundreds of thousands of dollars that it owes to a band called Metakicca but coz they don't know who Metakicca is the money just sits in a bank building interest, a simple typo can mean thousands of dollars in the pocket

Originally posted by beanos66:soundexchange has hundreds of thousands of dollars that it owes to a band called Metakicca but coz they don't know who Metakicca is the money just sits in a bank building interest, a simple typo can mean thousands of dollars in the pocket

soundexchange are controlled by the RIAA members Sony BMG, Warner, Universal & EMI though EMI's imput into the operation of soundexchange is to a much lesser part than the main 3 scum bags.

the gatkeepeers of media use soundexchange and the RIAA label to hide their real identity as they rip off artists, sue fans and try to remain the gatekeepers of distribution by blocking independent artists from getting any air play. they already own or control mostely all radio stations and have been allowed to introduce laws to enable them to block real talent unless they haver their maffia esk protection racket slice of the pie.

Quote:"With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"

what needs to happen is for copywrite to be restored to 14 years instead of the current 100 year + 70 years that was lobbied for by Disney, Sony & warner. and for sony, warner, universal & emi blocked from anticompetative behaviour and independent artists given rights for an equal playing field instead of having to bend to these scum.